Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Creating the Optimal Social Media Magnet Site

Value is the real underlying scene. If you have great stuff, and have bookmarked it yourself, and made plenty of friends out there in social media land - plus consistently participate in making their blogs filled out with comments - and have all the easy social bookmark buttons available at the bottom of very blog post, as well as on the top or whereever they can find them easily, then you should be able to make a real resource site that draws attention.

Relevance is the next key word. Your site has to contribute to what's going on.

Timely and Consistent come up next. You are going to have to have regular new data, and this should really be of a social media value, meaning podcasting, video, unique images from Flickr, etc. Definately Slideshare's. Lots of content, regularly posted and valuable.

One approach to this I've recently heard of is to post a snippet to your blog, which links you your website for the full data. So you keep the blog-readers happy and also get traffic to your web. RSS readers should be able to get the whole thing quickly.

The world has gone social - get on board...

So, the question, “Should you pay any attention to social bookmarking?” becomes “How do I take advantage of social bookmarking?” And the answer is, make your site worthy of bookmarking. Bookmarks appear to web crawlers as links to your page, and that makes them very valuable SEO tools. For some search engines, the more bookmarks that lead back to your site, the more “votes” you have on their popularity scale.

So, visit some of the social bookmarking sites on the Internet. Learn how they work. And set up your own account. Then, create your own list of links that includes your web sites, as well as other web sites that users might find relevant or useful.

On the web-site side, be sure to include the code snippets provided by social bookmarking organizations that allow users to tag your site easily. Then, maintain it all. Don’t just forget your account completely. If you do, eventually it will disappear and all the advantage of having one will go as well. Instead, continue using social bookmarking. Over time, the rewards will be increased traffic to your web site.